HERAT, Afghanistan — A leading Afghan warlord has called on followers to reorganize and defend the country as foreign troops withdraw, in a demonstration of faltering confidence in the government and the Western-built Afghan army.

Ismail Khan’s action has rankled Afghan officials and stoked fears that other regional and factional leaders will follow suit and re-arm, weakening support for the government and increasing the likelihood of civil war.

He is one of the strongest of a group of former mujahedeen leaders who defined the country’s recent history in battling the Soviets, the Taliban and one another, and who then were brought into President Hamid Karzai’s Cabinet as a symbol of unity.

This month, Khan rallied thousands of supporters outside Herat, the western provincial capital and center of his power base, urging them to coordinate and reactivate their networks.

In addition, he has begun enlisting recruits and organizing district command structures.

“We are responsible for maintaining security in our country and not letting Afghanistan be destroyed again,” Khan, the minister of energy and water, said at a news conference last weekend in Kabul.

But after facing weeks of criticism, he took care not to frame his action as defying the government.

“There are parts of the country where the government forces cannot operate,” Khan said, “and in such areas the locals should step forward, take arms and defend the country.”

Karzai and his aides, however, were not greeting it as an altruistic gesture. The governor of Herat province called Khan’s reorganization an illegal challenge to the national security forces.

And Karzai’s spokesman, Aimal Faizi, tersely criticized Khan.

“The remarks by Ismail Khan do not reflect the policies of the Afghan government,” Faizi said. “The government of Afghanistan and the Afghan people do not want any irresponsible armed grouping outside the legitimate security forces structures.”

In Kabul, Khan’s actions have played out in the news media and brought a fierce reaction from members of Parliament, who said the former warlords were preparing to take advantage of the U.S. troop withdrawal set for 2014.

“People like Ismail Khan smell blood,” said Belqis Roshan, a senator from Farah province. “They think that as soon as foreign forces leave Afghanistan, once again they will get the chance to start a civil war and achieve their ominous goals of getting rich and terminating their local rivals.”

Indeed, Khan’s is not the only voice calling for a renewed alliance of the mujahedeen against the Taliban, and some of the others are just as familiar.

“If the Afghan security forces are not able to wage this war, then call upon the mujahedeen,” Marshal Muhammad Qasim Fahim, an ethnic Tajik commander who is Karzai’s first vice president, said in September.

Another prominent former mujahedeen fighter, Ahmad Zia Massoud, said people fear what will happen after 2014, and he was telling his followers to make preliminary preparations.

“They don’t want to be disgraced again,” Massoud said. “Everyone tries to have some sort of Plan B. Some people are on the verge of re-arming.”

A senior Western official in Kabul saw Khan’s actions as the start of a wave of political positioning before the 2014 transition and said it bore close watching. The allies want to avoid a replay of the civil war in the 1990s that led hundreds of thousands of Afghans to flee and would undo much of what the West has tried to accomplish.

Khan is one of the towering figures of the resistance against the Soviets and the Taliban. His power base in Herat province, along the border with Iran, has remained relatively thriving throughout the war, despite a recent rise in kidnappings and militant attacks.

After years of consolidating power in the ’80s and early ’90s, Khan fled Herat after the Taliban took the city. After the northern coalition and U.S.-led invasion drove out the Taliban in 2001, he was restored as governor of Herat. But he was removed by Karzai in 2004, prompting violent demonstrations among his supporters.

He continues to exert strong influence in the western regions, and he clashes regularly with the current governor, Daud Shah Saba, Western officials say.

After the public criticism that he was creating an armed opposition to the government, Khan insisted Saturday at his news conference in Kabul that he was not re-arming followers or opposing the security forces.

Rather, he said, he wanted the mujahedeen to work with the army and police as a sort of reserve force, warning them, for example, if they saw signs of Taliban infiltration.

“This does not mean we are rebelling against the government,” he said. “We are struggling for 30 years to build this government, and we are not allowing this government to be toppled.”

Still, such an auxiliary role is exactly what was envisioned for the Afghan Local Police, organized and trained by U.S. Special Operations forces in recent years.

A former mujahedeen fighter, Saeed Ahmad Hussaini, a member of the provincial council in Herat, said that if the United States had not yet recognized its failure in Afghanistan, the Afghan people certainly had.

“We have rescued this nation twice from the hands of invaders and oppressors, and we will rescue it once more if needed,” he said.

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